Effective Time
Management In Business
How much time do you think is wasted in a business day?
Between the quick phone calls and email responses, nipping to the toilet,
popping to the shop, or just having a quick cup of tea, around 60% or less of
work time is spent actually doing what it is you’re meant to be doing.[i] This
leaves a pretty large part of your day where you are being unproductive, whether
it is your fault or not. Colleague interruptions, computer problems and
overrunning meetings are frequent culprits for distracting your worker’s
attention away from what they are meant to be doing, and as a business owner or
manager, this can be multiplied tenfold. There are certain ways to act and react
while at work that could save you hours of time collectively.
Do Not Check Your Emails
Although this may initially strike you as
counter-productive, I am not suggesting to never
check them. Instead, once you have begun a task it is very easy to go back to
check if you have received an email purely out of habit. Once in your inbox it
is then even easier to become distracted with other emails, pop up chats and
other things you need to do. By the time you come back to the task that was in hand,
you could have wasted up to, or over, half an hour. In most cases, there should
not be an email that will be so urgent it cannot wait for an hour or so for a
response. If this is not the case, arrange for someone to call you directly to
get your attention if they need it urgently.
If you use Microsoft Outlook then it is possible to set
your availability status; this will indicate to those trying to reach you
whether you will be around to reply or not. This will notify others that you
may not be immediately available, and also help you to ignore the urge to check
if anybody needs you.
IT Support
It can be incredibly stressful when a staff member comes up
to you in a panic of technical glitches and you can offer no solution. If you
are not naturally blessed with a technical mind, and you do not wish to learn
how to have one, it can often be difficult to support your staff if the use of
IT is required. In these cases it is more cost-effective and efficient to
outsource your IT support than fill an internal position. This is especially
the case in smaller companies where the demand for technical support is not
constant. The wonderful thing about computers is that they are (mostly)
universally the same. A computer technician does not need to fully understand
the ins and outs of your company to address a malfunctioning computer. For this
reason, outsourcing any technical problems to a local company can save you time
and money without sacrificing any efficiency within your business.
Fortunately too, especially for smaller businesses, you do
not need to be near a city to have this. There is IT
support in Tunbridge Wells, Tonbridge, Lewes, Eastbourne and Burgess Hill
as well as Brighton in East Sussex. Plus, with the technical advancements that
we see today, many IT issues can be resolved remotely so location does not have
to limit your IT support opportunities.
Utilise The Resources Available
Business in the twenty-first century benefits from having
uncountable numbers of helpful online and offline resources. Be these
time-saving, money-saving, memory boosting or organisation helping. From the
physical office regulars of post-it notes, highlighters, bulldog clips and ring
binders, we now see computer cloud technologies such as Dropbox and iCloud, email organisers like Boomerang for Gmail. These virtual
time organisers are great as they are at your workstation 24/7 and cannot be
lost, misplaced or forgotten about! There are even time management programmes
that can help do your time management for you. Task management software such as
Producteev
can provide invaluable support for your to-do list, and enable you to see
exactly where you are able to fit things in, even for a hectic meeting-filled
schedule.
If you feel that you and/or your team are lacking in task
organisation, or perhaps you feel that an improvement in this area could raise
efficiency and morale across your teams, an investment in any of these programmes
will enable you to pinpoint where the weaknesses lie and where you can work to
improve them.
These are only a small handful of opportunities you can use
to improve your business time and productivity. Quite often, even the smallest
of measures such as not checking your emails between tasks until you have time
to respond to them can save you hours per week.
[i]
https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/07/02/10-tools-to-make-you-more-efficient/
http://www.servalsystems.co.uk/
https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/communicator-help/change-your-presence-status-HA101850359.aspx
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